The GestaHerwardi is Hugh Candidus’ translation and
rewriting of Leofric the Deacon’s account of the events which best illustrated
the character of Hereward, the renowned soldier (Chapter I). In the
text, its hero is called Herwardus
and described as Magister Militum.Herwardus
is the Latinized form of the English Hereward, which appears to have the same
meaning as magister militum. This
coincidence of meaning seems unlikely to have occurred by chance, so the
following notes are intended to collect the facts as far as they are known and
to draw conclusions as to their possible implications. However, it must be
stated that attempting to understand thinking of 900 years ago is not an exact
science.

The tentative conclusions drawn are that:

·Hereward is unlikely to have been a Christian name
or a Pagan one of the same pattern but was rather, a sobriquet arising from the
man’s outstanding skill as a leader of soldiers.

·the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s use of the name Hereward
after 1116, the year of the Peterborough fire (Higham
p. xviii), may have been influenced by a knowledge of the original, English, Gesta text but that by 1086, the use of
the name was current to the extent of needing no explanation or qualification (DB).

As part of the sweeping
reforms of civil and military organization made by Diocletian and Constantine in the third
and fourth centuries, three new army ranks or posts appeared namely:-

First: Magister
EquitumMaster of Horse

MagisterPeditumMaster of Foot

and later:Magister MilitumMaster of Troops

These were all
commanders of mobile field armies, though the exact differences between them
appear to be uncertain and are, in any case, likely to have varied with the
passage of time. This is especially true of Magister
Equitum which, in Latin or, in the vernacular version, Master of the Horse,
is found in accounts through to even post-Medieval times and ended by including
ironical use, when applied to the chief groom of a stable. However, ignoring
the jocular, it does seem likely that the third ultimately superseded the first
two. In time these titles came to be applied to the principal lieutenant of a dictator. By the eleventh century, the
latter term had come to describe a man like the Duke of Normandy or the Count
of Flanders, who was an autonomous ruler, nominally the vassal of a feudal
superior. In these two cases, the superior was the king of France. The Gesta Herwardi Latin text makes it clear
(Chapter XII) that Hereward was militarily, both
right-hand man to Robert, who
as the future Count of Flanders, could be regarded as the dictator, and the commander of his field force. So Robert as
commander-in-chief of his expedition into Zeeland, would have
attended to the strategy
of the campaign, while Hereward would have been responsible to him for the
general state and discipline of the field force and for the tactics used in any
engagements.

During the course of
the Gesta account, Hereward is clearly
appointed to equivalent positions in the campaign in Ireland (Chapter V), and at the Siege
of Ely (Chapters XX & XXII). The title ‘Master of Soldiers’
appears explicitly in Sweeting’s translation in chapters XII, XIV and XXII while ‘magister militum’ appears in chapters
XII, XIV and XXIII of
the Latin text. In Chapter XXII the phrase is ‘..ab Herwardo magistro
militum insulæ’, a clear statement of his position in the Isle of Ely. However, there Hereward was
the lieutenant of the Abbot and the earl, Morcar. The question of Earl Edwin’s
presence is ambiguous, since he is said in different places, to have been killedbefore he could arrive (ASC1071) and to have been present(Chapter
XXII). Since the ASC saysthat he was takenwith William on the latter’s return to Normandy, in
the spring of 1075, itseemslikely Edwin was amongthoseat
Ely. This looks like a case where
versions of the ASC differ and it
is to the Gestathatwe must turn for arbitration.
Which if any, of theseindividuals was seen as the principal is not made clear.

HereWeard.

It is interesting to
see that the Latin term, Magister Militum,
clearly a job description for Hereward’s position in the Flemish the other armies,
has the same literal meaning as his own name. A ward or weard was a
watchman, guard, keeper or warden (OED). We may cover all these terms by
using the anachronistic word ‘supervisor’. A here means an army or a military force
of one size or another (OED).
Just as a steward was the supervisor of the service of a household, particularly
with regard to feeding it; a woodward, or wuduweard
was the supervisor of the timber-production aspect of woodland, as opposed to a
forester, who was more concerned with the game; and a hayward was a supervisor
of the fencing of an estate or parish, so a hereward
would have been the a supervisor of a military force. This raises the question
of how Hereward acquired the name. Its obvious appropriateness suggests that it
was a sobriquet rather than a name given in the Christian manner, on admission
to membership of the Church – normally soon after birth. While Christianity was
a fairly new idea for some of the English of Danish background, it was well
established among them by the mid-1030s, when Hereward was born. Any
able-bodied son of an earl of Mercia
would have been expected to become a military officer on reaching manhood and a
lowly-born man could not aspire to it. So whichever was the case with our man,
it appears unlikely that he would have been selected in infancy for such a
name, but might have acquired it once he began to prove himself outstanding as
a young leader of men; as we are told that to his father’s discomfiture, he did
(Chapter II).

It looks then, as
though, in his original work, writing in English, Leofric the Deacon, will have used the term hereweard both as a sobriquet and as a job description, depending
on context. When Hugh Candidus was seeking an appropriate, known, Latin term to
express Hereward’s status in Robert’s
army he chose ‘magister militum’ to
describe his subject’s function, while retaining the Latinized English Herwardus as the personal name. While
Hugh does admit that he is not fully familiar with English (Chapter I), Leofric’s
two ways of using of the term hereweard
would have been fairly distinct. Any use by Leofric of the English article, Ƿe(the) to differentiate between his
two meanings, master of soldiers and The Master of Soldiers, will have been
lost in Hugh’s translation into Latin, and not re-introduced in connection with
the word, hereward, by the reverse
translation because Sweeting understandably, saw Herwardus as a Christian name rather than as a sobriquet.

We are left having to explain why the Anglo
Saxon Chronicle (1070 and 71) and Domesday Book refer to a man
or men called Hereward or Hereuuard.
If it was a sobriquet, it tends to confirm that those references are all to our
man and that by 1086, the name was widely associated with him. The name would
then represent what the French would call his surnom, by which is meant nickname, or in the case of a king or hero,
the English equivalent is ‘name’ (Collins
Robert). The outcome
of the subsequent English adoption of the word, surnom is its development into the modern meaning, surname. In
other words, people nowadays called Carpenter for example, have an ancestor who
was notable as a carpenter. Rather than being so-and-so Leofricson (the Gesta text, Chapter II, tells us that he
was the son of one Leofric; Lefricus
de Brunne), our man was
sufficiently outstanding from the crowd as a leader of soldiers, to be thought
of as ‘Ƿe
hereuueard’ (The
Hereward).

In the present text,
there is no hint of the epithet applied to him later, ‘The Wake’. It appeared
in Peterborough,
the mid thirteenth century (DNB
Hereward). Its use seems to have developed well after he died, when his
descendants through marriage into the Wake family, felt that his kudos made it
worth their claiming him as an ancestor. So it seems, he was but it was only in
the fourth generation after his, that the link with the Wakes was made (Trollope. 1st.
Genealogical table).
This would indicate that, after the expiry of this time, his kudos was still
alive though he was not. Hugh Wake, who married Hereward’s descendant, Emma,
died in 1172; about the time when Hugh Candidus was working on the script.

Ostensibly, the Anglo Saxon Chronicle’s yearly
accounts were roughly contemporary with the events, so indicating a date by
which the man had acquired the name. But, we need to check that the version of
the ASC from which the information was taken, was not a subsequent rewriting of
the text, after loss by fire, or for some other reason. For example, the E, or
Peterborough Chronicle was written in the eleventh to twelfth centuries and
originally based on an earlier one from Canterbury(Savage p. 12) but beyond this, the account given by
Savage is insufficient to answer the present question.

The Wikipedia article
on the Peterborough
Chronicle draws attention to the way in which the document shows that its rewriting
drew upon several sources. During this process, a well-known name for the
Hereward character might have been substituted for a more obscure Christian
name. Since the Gesta text was kept
in the place where the Peterborough Chronicle was written, in Peterborough
Abbey, the Gesta may have influenced
the Chronicle: but for the fact that the relevant Peterborough fire happened in 1116 and Hugh
Candidus’ Gesta was written in around
1170.

On the other hand,
Leofric the Deacon’s English text had been written around 1110. By 1170, the
monks had largely forgotten it (Chapter I) but they still had access to it. In
1116, the existence of what was then a relatively recently-written text would
have been known about by the current generation but this was in English so its
readers would have found the English article (Ƿe) had it been there. Like Leofric,
the writer of the Peterborough Chronicle was writing in English. The available
modern translations of the Old English do not include that article. Given that
they accurately represent the original and have not been influenced by the
modern scholars’ preconceptions, it looks as though our man may have been
widely known as ‘Hereward’ by the time Leofric the Deacon (or perhaps we should
now call him Leofric Deacon) was writing (ca. 1110).

The modern popular
editions of the Anglo-Saxon chronicles are a conflation of several. If it is not in the Peterborough Chronicle but
in some other of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles that the name occurs, the above
reasoning may seem to fall down. In any case, if the name is found only
elsewhere, we still need to note whether it is accompanied by an article (Ƿe). However, insofar as the above
argument holds up, it would do so still, given a non-Peterborough source. A
more distant source of the ASC reference would mean only that the man’s reputation
had spread further. But we know that this had happened well before 1116, since
the Domesday Book compilers, probably in Winchester,
had accepted the use of the name in around 1086 when field workers reported it
from Lincolnshire,
Warwickshire and Worcestershire. The Lincolnshire
connection with the present Hereward is consistent with the Gesta story.
Similarly, the other two west Midlands
counties seem to have been those of his father’s family roots. We are not
likely to find proof of the identity of the Herewards
in the three counties but so far as it goes, the evidence is consistent with a
view of the three men as one.